Karl Franz Brendel (jan 1, 1811 – jan 1, 1868)

Description:

a German music critic, journalist and musicologist.

“Historicism” defines social and cultural situations by their history.
1. It was promoted by Karl Heinz Brendel.
2. He wrote the most popular music history of the nineteenth century, Geschichte der Musik.

Historicism and the Hegelian Dialectic
A. The Hegelian dialectic has become somewhat a cliché. History is always in a state of flux.
B. The Hegelian dialectic aims to show why things change. Historical change is to realize human freedom—the progress of the world soul.
C. Brendel adopted these values.
1. He saw the history of music as a series of emancipations.
2. Musical value was best measured in how it embodied its own era’s evolutionary synthesis and pointed forward.
3. Brendel placed the highest value on German composers.

The New German School
A. Brendel became editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik after Schumann, and his aesthetic preferences differed substantially from those of his predecessor.
B. He formed a new organization to promote his agenda for progressive music and gave the
keynote address at its formation.
1. Brendel named a group of composers who comprised the “New German School.”
2. Liszt was the honorary president.
C. The “New German School” came to be identified with Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner.
D. Liszt began writing symphonic poems, which follow the Hegelian ideal of “unity of the poetic
and the musical.”
1. The symphonic poems differ from earlier program pieces in that their poetic content
was philosophical, not narrative.
2. Liszt felt that the audience did not have to be entertained, but subjected to higher
demands.

“The Music of the Future”
A. The composers of the New German School adopted the slogan “Music of the Future,” coined
by one of Liszt’s lovers.
B. The phrase was easily turned into joke, and Brendel advocated not using it.



Key Terms:

historicism: a) the theory that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history; b) the tendency to regard historical development as the most basic aspect of human existence.

Hegelian Dialetic: the principle that history progresses through a process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

New German School: see the yellow umbrella category for this tab

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